If you have ever found yourself scrambling to find what to post on your school’s social media then this blog is for you. Creating a School Social Media content calendar is a great way to help plan and reduce your stress. If you have a well thought out plan and everything is pre-scheduled it will save so much time whilst maintaining a high level of quality of posts promoting your school. It is an effective way to help plan communication in your parental engagement strategy.

Sound good? Great! Let’s begin.

What is a Social Media Content Calendar?

However your school uses their social media, a clear social media content calendar is a great tool to use. It allows you to plan social posts ahead of time around key dates and events in your school’s diary. Therefore nothing gets missed. 

 TOP TIP – If you decide to use a social media management system such as Schudio’s, you are able to schedule social posts ahead of time to your social media platforms with ease. Also, these platforms allow you to analyse which platform gets the most interactivity. Once you know this you can focus more on that specific social platform for higher engagement. Find out how to create an engaging social media strategy for your school here.

Deciding what to include

When deciding what to include in your social media content calendar, you need to decide what you’re using your social platforms for. Are you using them to engage and inform parents about school life? Are you using them to promote your school? Once you start asking these questions, you’ll start to define your social media strategy for your school. In doing this you will get a clearer idea of what kind of posts to include. Here are 4 great social media post ideas for you to include.

Note important upcoming dates

You can build your content calendar around important school dates. You can post when your next parent’s evening is or when the next sports day is. Then you can pop this in your calendar and place when you’d like the post to go out to notify people to advertise the event. Another thing to add to your content calendar is world dedicated days such as world book a day or pancake days. These things are great to engage your audience. Having engaging social media is important for schools.

Text in social posts

Once you have dates sorted you can also include what text or media will go in the post. Having text to go along with your chosen media is important and doing this ahead of time can save your future self when posting. If you post a video that you want the parents to watch maybe have a short sentence about what the video is about and invite them to watch it. Keep text with media shorter as people are less likely to read a long paragraph. Depending on what platform you are using you have a limited space anyways.

Include Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is great to include in your social media content calendar. As you have already made the post so this is an easy solution to help fill it out. What is evergreen content you ask? Well, it is something that can be used multiple times without expiring or becoming irrelevant. For example, sharing a blog on back to school tips at the beginning of the year can be used annually.

Posting and Scheduling

There will be two things to consider. How often to post? And who will be in charge of scheduling the posts?

Think of what is achievable as being teachers you are so busy already so don’t set unrealistic standards of how many posts to include. Start small with maybe 1-2 posts a week and work from there. You can always add more but if the standard is 2 posts a week, at least you know there is something going out. Lastly, nominate someone who is in charge of creating the content calendar and scheduling the posts. Whether it’s the same person or 2 different people. This can easily get forgotten about but having someone dedicated to these roles will be their responsibility for them action it.

I hope this blog post helped you think about what to include when creating your Social Media Content Calendar.  We offer a Social media manager for schools. Find more about this service here.